STORIES

Sitting on train in 1943, Barbara was faced with an old familiar boredom. She was traveling with her mom and older sister to meet her father, an ROTC officer, at an army base down south. Sitting in one of the stuffy sleeper cars, Barbara couldn’t take the waiting any longer. The terrible boredom drove her to leave her mother and sister sitting in the sleeper car while she set out to explore the rest of the train.

Half an hour later, her panic-stricken mother found her performing a one-girl variety show for a carriage of rapt soldiers. Like a little Shirley Temple, Barbara tap danced and did ballet pirouettes in the aisle and sang songs, much to the delight of all the men onboard.

Eleanor is simply “Grams” to her loving granddaughter Jess. The two share a special bond. A horse-lover all her life, Grams shared in her granddaughter’s passion. Grams took Jess and her little cousin Carrie to Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Kentucky. For a couple horse-crazy teens, seeing the world-renowned equestrian facility was a dream come true.

On warm summer days, Jess and Grams would ride their horses down weathered country roads. Grandma rode Kit. Jess rode Tess. They’d throw reality to the wind in these horseback moments, their small Wisconsin farm town would be the English countryside of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice – a book and film all three generations of Severson women adore.

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Bucky and Barbara spent two nights in a cabin on Lake Mille Lacs, which served as their honeymoon. Then, just like that, he packed his bags and away he went to attend basic training in Fort Leonard Wood in the Missouri Ozarks for three months.

The young bride was beside herself with grief to be separated so soon from her husband. Still living at home with her parents, she shut herself in her bedroom, crying and listening to her Ames Brothers record. Her and Bucky’s song was “You, You, You,” and she played it over and over and over, waiting for him to come home.

“I was so lonesome," Barbara says. "I knew how long he’d be away, and so I took paperclips, connected them into long strings, and hung them all over my room. There was one paperclip for every day he’d be gone. And each day that went by, I removed one paperclip.”

He was funny.

“Yeah, you could say that,” Eleanor dabbed her eyes. “He made me laugh, and cry.”

The love of her life, husband of 47 years and father to her three children, Don Severson would show Eleanor the world. Serving in the United States Air Force, Don and the family lived everywhere from Maine to Louisiana, and as far as Tokyo, Japan.

They had it made in Japan. They lived in a two-bedroom bungalow. Their three small children, all two years apart, shared a bedroom and there was a maid on-site to keep their busy lives in order. Following their return to the States, their eldest daughter Kathy secured first place in the Broiler Fest parade – an annual event attended by 20,000 plus people in their small hometown of Eleva, Wisconsin. Her colorful kimono was the wildest thing the tiny Nordic village had ever seen.

In the early 1900s, the O'Sullivan brothers left their hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, and headed west. Their dream: to establish a family farming operation in Montana near the Yellowstone River Valley. With 3,000 untouched acres in front of them, they built three homesteads – one where Meg O'Sullivan would reside with five older siblings. There, on this 20-person family ranch, Meg cultivated a loyalty to family, strong work ethic and passion for the Catholic faith. 

“This was the ranch. Here is the road coming in. My attempt at a cattle gate as it came in and there were three houses. Our house was here. We had our own country school where we went to grade school because we had enough kids to qualify. My dad was the clerk of record for the school district.”
 

Barbara was only five years old, but she was aware of the war. There was a bigness to it, a mass, looming like a storm and about to break. In the evenings, she remembered, her parents would shoo her and her older sister Alice up to their bedroom as company filtered in downstairs. Pretty women in printed A-line skirts and tall men in high-waisted trousers would stand in the living room, drinking Manhattans and smoking cigarettes. All of the men downstairs were in the service. Snippets of the conversation would float up the stairs. There was always the talk of war.  

The Seversons were not keen on sleeping in on the weekends. Their blue jumpsuits resting on hangers in the hallway signaled an early rise. Every Saturday, the couple would be greet the morning sun aboard a small, piston-powered plane.  To prepare, Don was fastidious about watching the 10 o’clock news – jotting down every angle of the next day’s weather. Wind speed. Barometric pressure. Visibility.

Together, Eleanor and Don were Civil Air Patrols. The federally-supported, volunteer position involved three key missions: emergency services, aerospace education and cadet programs for teenage youth.

Barbara’s father was in the Reserve Officers Training Corps, the ROTC, which meant that he had to leave his position as a chemistry instructor at the University of Minnesota and travel to his appointed army base to begin work training the men.

The move took Barbara to Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. She saw towering live oaks and flowering dogwoods. She witnessed the reality of the segregated south. She learned to say “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am” when speaking to adults. When she was on the army base, she swung on the swing sets while in the distance men ran drills. She never failed to stop swinging the instant she heard the tart blow of a trumpet sounding taps. Barbara would locate the flag and salute it.

At night, my sister Kaye did her homework, and I tried to get it done in study periods, so that after 6:00 dinner, and by the time that Kaye and I got dishes done, I wanted to read. Any time I had free time, honey, I was reading. My sister said I always had my nose in a book. I devoured "The Bobbsey Twins" when I was five years old, and "Nancy Drew" of course, the girl detective, of which my aunt Marie always kept me supplied. I had a library card when I was in first grade on.  And before that, my dad would use his library card to get me books. If I wanted James Fenimore Cooper, that whole series, or the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, my aunt got all of those for me and I just went from one series to the next. My sister and I had the big front room on the second floor of our house, and we had an alcove where my bed was and I always had a flashlight so I could finish some book. Oh, I just loved those days, I loved those books.